Internet companies, advertisers and Wall Street investors, to name but a few, desire accurate counts of the number of visitors their web sites or other visitable sites or enterprises actually receive. Web companies brag about their numbers in prospectuses. Advertisers use these numbers to determine how many viewers their advertisements will reach. Investors want third party data to justify their investments in companies and may use these numbers for such verification.
Although the Internet was supposed to be the most measurable medium ever, and was supposed to be able to instantly track and record millions of clicks, most independent measurement companies still use surprisingly old-fashioned methods for measuring the number of visitors to a web site. In one frequently employed method, “panels” are recruited, with these panels including thousands of users who agree to install special software that tracks every online move the users make. These panels function much like the legendary squads of television viewers monitored by Neilsen Media research to provide so called “Neilsen Ratings” for television broadcasts and programming.
Increasingly, web publishers and online merchants are questioning the findings derived from panel sampling methods and, instead, are gathering vast quantities of information on their own by examining a digital trail or “log files” left by visitors visiting the web sites. These web enterprises claim that the log files provide exact representations of their audiences and that these measurements are more accurate than panel based projections of audience size.
The panel sampling and projection proponents for measuring web site audiences criticize the log file approach because the log files cannot distinguish between unique visitors and those who log on more than one time to a web site from different computers. In addition, hits made by crawlers, that is the software programs that scour the Internet on behalf of search engines, may be counted, which could inflate the recorded traffic, even though no actual visitor is really looking at the site during these hits.
On the other hand, the log file digital trail proponents criticize the panel based sampling methods because the demographic makeup of the panel can sometimes skew the results for a particular web site, causing this web site to be under-represented and under counted. Moreover, panel based sampling methods frequently do not track international traffic, which penalizes many companies or sites that receive many or most of their visitors from overseas. The large disparities between the projected audience numbers obtained by panel sampling methods as compared with the digital trail log file counting methods remain a cause for concern.
Regardless of which method is used for obtaining Internet audience user data, the commercially available products and services provided as Internet Audience Measurements,(IAM) tend to indicate the popularity of web site by reporting the total number of “hits” and/or “visits” that are recorded at a particular site during any given time interval, usually a month. Another approach that has been used reports the total amount of time spent by visitors at given web site. The primary thrust of either of these techniques is always directed at collecting and profiling vast quantities of bulk data. Typically information about the total number of hits or visits made to a site is collated with significant amounts of supporting demographic information. The net results tend to fall into a predictable pattern of tables of statistics, matrices and other historical recaps. However, this information can be hard to read or analyze.
Thus, there are many shortcomings in the currently available methods for determining inbound traffic intensities for visitable enterprises. Simply measuring the total number of hits or visits to a particular visitable site does not differentiate between longer, more meaningful stays, and very short accidental or otherwise unmeaningful visits. On the other hand, simply counting the number of total minutes spent at a site may give skewed results because individuals may establish a connection to a web site and then leave their computer for one reason or another, thereby clocking minutes when no meaningful visit is occurring.
Accordingly, a better and more intelligent measure of the audience or traffic to a web site or other visitable site, or more broadly stated, a better way of measuring the viewers or visitors to any visitable enterprise is still needed, especially by members of the business, advertising and investing communities.